Every You, Every Me (2 page)

Random.

Meaning:

Completely without a pattern.

or

Completely without a
recognizable
pattern.

Meaning:

Either the event is outside any pattern.

or

We are unable to comprehend the pattern.

I folded the envelope in half, careful that the photo wasn’t caught in the crease.

(I try to be a careful person. Most of the time my carelessness is completely unintentional.)

I looked around one more time, stood in the center of the bare trees, at the exact center.

Then I headed home and I lost focus and the barrage in my head started again.

You will never be happy again. Why do you even think about it?

Five minutes after I picked up the photo, it rained.

This pain is all that you have.

I think:

If I’d been five minutes later, it would have been raining   if it had been five minutes later, I would have been dashing through the rain, not noticing   if I’d been five minutes later, the envelope and the photo would have been soaked, ruined.

I think:

If I’d been five minutes later, none of this would have happened.

I know:

It probably would have happened anyway. Just not like this.

1B

I woke up at two in the morning, feeling guilty that I hadn’t asked you what you wanted this year.

2

The next morning I returned to the same spot. I didn’t tell myself I was going to do it. I just walked there. It was still cloudy; the sun had risen, but I couldn’t really see it. It was like the day had no hours. I only knew it was morning because I was so tired.

I hadn’t really slept.
I never really sleep anymore.

I didn’t expect there to be anything to find, so I was surprised when I saw the second envelope.

It wasn’t in the same spot as the first one. This time it was in the exact center of the four bare trees. Like someone had drawn an X between them, and the envelope marked the crossing point.
The crosshairs.

The ground was still wet, and as I walked over it, my boots sank a little. Even though it was so close to school, nobody was around. It was too early for them. Everyone else was asleep. I was the morning watchman.

Only what could be safe with me? What could I protect? I hadn’t been able to stop harm. I’d harmed.

I picked up the envelope and looked at it. Still no address, no clue. Sealed blankness.

I wanted more of your handwriting. After you were gone, I realized how little of it I had.

I ripped open the envelope and shook the photo out into my hand.

This time, it was a much bigger surprise.

It was a picture of me.

I was the photo.

2A

Nobody ever took my picture. They didn’t want to. Or I wouldn’t let them.

You were the only exception.

2B

I looked all around. Into the woods. At the school. Down the path. The full 360.
“So it’s all come full circle,” you said.
I didn’t feel like I was being watched, but the possibility was there.

The only possibility that was gone was the possibility of randomness. Because it was me inside the envelope. Because the envelope was dry. Because it hadn’t stopped raining until about an hour ago. Because that meant whoever had left it had come out at daybreak to do it. Maybe he or she knew I’d be here early. Maybe he or she knew me and what time I’d be here.

You would have known that. Jack would have known that.

It felt a little less like a mystery and more like a game. A trick.
A trap.

I put the photo in the envelope and the envelope in my pocket. I wondered why my name hadn’t been written on it. What if someone else had found it?

The rest of the walk to school, my mind returned to zeros and ones.
This 001110101110 is 011101100110 a 10011101 language 1111110000000.
Focused on nothing, open to everything—it’s a state I fall into, where all my senses swap. My voice is blind, my hearing is mute, my sight is deaf. Art is science, mathematics is conversation, and music is something that bleeds. I am so far away that I’m inside myself. I barely notice colors unless I taste them. Not the yellows or the greens. I taste the deeper blues. The darker reds.

You see, I understand.

The school doors were still locked, so I sat on the patio in the back. It was just me and a collection of wet cigarette butts
one two three four five six countless
, and I wondered if it would be possible to make a language out of their arrangement. Was it a pattern or was it chaos? I always thought that if I looked long enough, I could find the pattern.
01001100011100001111
And if I didn’t look long enough, there would be chaos.
At first, I could not understand the screaming.

My thoughts always exist within a windstorm; they have to be strongly rooted in order to stay. So when Jack finally joined me, I had already forgotten about the photo. I thought of you and looked for you next to him, as if my mind suddenly believed it was two months ago. I saw that his hair was longer, that the peak in the front was a little higher, a little blonder than what I usually pictured when I pictured him.
Remember when you were happy? Well, it’s a lie.
I felt like there was something I had to tell him. I noticed someone turning on the lights in the school library.

Good morning, library.

“How long have you been here?” he asked. He didn’t look awake yet, like his synapses were still cloudy even though his body was going through the morning motions.

“Not long,” I said, mostly because I had no idea how long it had been.

“What’d you do last night?”

I never do anything.
“Not much. You?”

“Nothing.”

I never knew if Jack came to the patio this early because he knew I’d be there, or if he would’ve done it anyway. We were
best
friends
by default
but it was like our friendship was never fully awake, either. We were each closer to you than we were to each other. Your absence dulled us.

Jack took out a cigarette and asked, “You mind?”

He always asked, and I always said I didn’t, even though I did.

Why do you want to put more smoke inside of you?

You said you hated his smoking, but you didn’t really, not in the way that you hated other things, like life.

He lit up and took drags in between sips of coffee. My attention started to scatter into details, like the way his lip stuck for a second on the plastic coffee-cup lid or the weight of the ashes that fell from his cigarette. You think ashes float, but really they just gather together until there are enough of them to fall straight down.
That was something you would see. That was something you would say.

I remembered the photo in my pocket and took out the envelope.

“This yours?” I asked.

“What is it?”

“I found it. There’s a picture inside.”

Jack shook his head, exhaled some smoke. It matched the color of the sky, but I could still tell when it disappeared.

“Not mine,” he said. “Where’d you find it?”

“Near the woods.”

“What’s in it?”

“I told you, a picture.”

Jack took one last drag, then dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. He reached out his hand and I passed the envelope over to him. As he opened it, I could feel the smoke on his fingers painting itself onto the envelope.
Taint.
The cigarette on the ground was still burning.

“Hey, that’s a good photo of you,” he said. “Who took it?”

“I don’t know. That’s the point. I don’t know.” Then I told him the whole story about finding the first photograph, and how whoever took it must have taken one of me while I was finding the first one.

“Fascinating,” Jack said, but it was clear from the sound of his voice that the fascination wouldn’t last much longer than the cigarette had.

“So it wasn’t you?” I asked.

“No,” he said, still looking at the photo.

“Maybe it was Ariel?”

Say her name.

Now Jack looked up, a little bit tired of me.

“Ev, you know it couldn’t have been Ariel.”

He said your name.

“What if she’s back?”

Jack returned the photo and lit another cigarette, this time not asking me if it was okay.

“Ev, she’s not back.”

“But what if …”

“It’s not her.”

“So some random stranger took my picture yesterday and left it for me this morning?”

“It wasn’t yesterday.”

“What?”

He leaned over and pointed to the photo, his cigarette jutting out from between his fingers, chimneying his hand.

“You weren’t wearing that yesterday. And there wasn’t that much sun yesterday. This is from another day.”

I tried. I really tried to think of when someone might have taken my picture. Not posed. Not premeditated. Spontaneous.

But no.

You were the only exception.

“Freaky,” Jack said. Then he looked away from me, at the other people who were on the patio with us.
Seeing us as two friends talking. Our morning routine. Everything routine.
They’d appeared without me noticing. My brain took them off mute. I heard their voices without making out the words.

Freaky.
That was Jack’s conclusion. And I knew it was pointless to talk to him about anything after he’d come to a conclusion.

Still, I had to ask.

“Have you heard from her?”

He shook his head.

“It’s a good photo,” he said. Then we went inside and split off into our own trajectories.

There were so many voices, so many people around me. I stood there on the side of the hallway and watched everyone pass—some traveling together, some meeting up, most entirely unaware of anything besides where they were going, each particle knowing its own destination without ever knowing the exact path.
Is this what you meant when you said you were splitting?
Every step, even the smallest movement, marking a different line. I started plotting out the variations of my own route—not just the ways I could go, but all the people I might step a little bit aside for, or slow down for, or speed up to see. I was starting to get lost in my own infinities, so I refocused on the faces, on the people I knew and the people I recognized and the people who seemed familiar and the people who were strangers even though we had this school in common. There were two thousand of us in this building, and one of them, I thought, was responsible for the photograph in my pocket. One of the two thousand was responsible for the envelopes and the mystery and my thoughts at that exact moment. One of them had done it.

Unless it was the girl who wasn’t here.

2C

I’m lying, aren’t I?

I never wanted you to take my picture. You did, but I never really wanted it.

We were at the pool. It had to be summer. I didn’t want to take my shirt off. I never took my shirt off. But you said I was being ridiculous. That was your word.
Ridiculous.
Mostly friendly, but a little teasing. You asked me what I was ashamed of. Had I carved Molly Hughes’s name on my chest? Were there unicorn tattoos I hadn’t told you about? Was I wearing a man girdle? I wasn’t really laughing, but I wasn’t not laughing. You tugged at my shirt. I said fine and took it off. Felt the sun. Felt so pale. And you took out your camera. Said you had to capture this for posterity.

I felt like I was your accomplishment, when what I really wanted was to be your friend.

“You see,” you said, “you have nothing to hide.”

I didn’t want you to see me with my shirt off. It was weird.

I never saw the picture. You might have deleted it.

I mean, I doubt you still have it.

Did the accomplishment mean anything in the end?

3

I went back to the spot after school, but there wasn’t any new photo there. Same thing the next morning. Even though I knew two points didn’t make a pattern, I was still disappointed to find nothing there. It couldn’t just end. Not now.

3A

You are leaving me messages, but I haven’t gotten the message yet.

3B

I took out my notebook. I ripped out a page. I wrote
WHO ARE YOU?
across the top and left the rest of it blank. I moved the second photograph into the first photograph’s envelope, then stuck the note in the empty one. I left it there before meeting up with Jack on the patio.

When I ran back between second and third periods, the envelope was gone.

But there wasn’t anything left in its place.

3C

I checked during lunch. I checked after school.

The spot was empty. Empty but not void. Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty—with empty, you are aware of what’s supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.

Once again, a grayness was settling in.
My mood.
The light around me was changing its properties.
I tried to catch it dimming, but it was imperceptible.